Infant dies of listeria after mother consumes raw milk during pregnancy

[thewayne]

Sigh. And it happened in my state of New Mexico.

Raw milk is something that Robert FUCKING Kennedy Junior Mint advocates for, claiming it's healthy. It is decidedly not. It's swarming with pathogens that can be quite deadly which is why the death rate went down after pasteurization became a dairy industry standard practice.

So all together now: Hey, Hey, RFK: how many kids have you killed today!

The medical examiner can't directly tie the infant's death to the raw milk consumption of the mother except noting there's not many other places the child could have contracted listeria from.


What's worse, I just read today that women are now training for pregnancy like they train for doing a triathlon. Including the consumption of raw milk. Thus I expect this is just the first such report that we'll be seeing like this.

https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/02/newborns-death-spurs-raw-milk-warning-in-new-mexico/

Comments

[arlie]

I feel certain it's possible to produce known safe raw milk, but it would require a lot of monitoring, and damned if I know what you'd do about the tendency of a cow's tail to sweep both her anus and her udders, transferring material from the former to the latter. (Actually, it's more likely the tail picks up the cow shit from her legs; the anus thing is just a catchy sound bite. Either way, you end up with cow shit on the udder.)

You'd probably have to test every single small batch of milk, and discard a lot of them, which would be expensive. Providers would have a strong financial temptation to cut corners, so they'd need to be monitored closely - as well as themselves needing to closely monitor their own production process.

The problem is that this kind of monitoring is more attention intensive than merely heating all milk to a critical temperature - but not higher - on its route from cow to consumer. That requires monitoring too - otherwise some dodgy and/or inept providers won't bother with the extra step, or not do it consistently. But it's at least rather easier to monitor.

More raw milk is exactly what no one needs when the FDA (or whatever agency does this sort of monitoring; it might be state level) is understaffed already and a target for "starving the beast".

But the rest of us are OK until cheapskate providers find they can get away with passing off raw milk as pasteurized, saving some trivial amount of their money in the process. Fortunately (?) homogenization generally goes along with pasteurization, and a consumer can readily identify un-homogenized milk. But AFAIK, there's no consumer accessible way to easily identify non-pasteurized milk.

[thewayne]

I read a reply, I think on Ars Technica, from someone who lived on a milk farm.  From what he described, there's absolutely no way you can keep the cow's udders and teats clean in even a moderately-sized operation, or even the milking equipment sterile, so they basically don't try - they don't have the man-power, if they did the price of milk would soar.  They do hose out the milk house between milkings.  Their grass diet makes their feces very wet, and they still dump while being milked, which is another problem with trying to keep the milking equipment sterile.  They simply can't do it.  Each milking station has a paper filter, which is replaced between the two daily milking sessions, but not between cows.  It's an extremely filthy operation.  Pasteurization is very important, and the only way I'll consume it since I'm immune-compromised.

[arlie]

Yeesh! It's even worse than I realized.

[thewayne]

Milk production is pretty horrible.  And what I wrote is very tamed down from what I read!